An Engineer Creates for Fun After a Lifetime of Workaday Rules

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Seth R. Goldstein, formerly a biomedical engineer with the National Institutes of Health, with "Why Knot," a device driven by 10 electric motors that ties a necktie.CreditCreditMatt Roth for The New York Times

LINING the steep flagstone steps to a glass-walled house in a rocky, tree-shrouded neighborhood near Washington are two- and three-inch-thick twisted branches of an invasive vine that strangles the area’s hardiest oaks and sycamores. Seth R. Goldstein and his wife Paula Stone tear it from local woodlands and shape it into railings for the steps and into sculptures they show at community art exhibits.

At the top of the steps to the right of the door they have attached a replica of a red-crested pileated woodpecker. A retractable cord from an expired vacuum cleaner hangs from the woodpecker’s tail. Pull the cord, and the beak moves back and forth, striking the wall louder than any doorbell.

A 75-year-old, 5-foot-5, 120-pound sparrow of a man comes to the door. With four degrees in mechanical and electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Mr. Goldstein calls himself an engineer. Most of what he makes moves. The American Visionary Arts Museum in Baltimore, which is exhibiting one of his works, calls him a kinetic sculptor.

Thirteen years ago Mr. Goldstein retired from the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, where he was a biomedical engineer. He owns or shares in 12 patents. One innovation is a supple spaghetti-thin catheter that a surgeon guides into an inoperable brain tumor to deliver chemotherapy, while minimizing side effects and damage to other tissues.

These days in his basement workshop, Mr. Goldstein makes machines that lack any commercial or — with the exception of the woodpecker — functional utility. But his work has purpose. He is pushing the envelope of engineering and hoping to stir the imaginations of young engineers to push their own envelopes.

“Why Knot?” for example, uses 10 electric motors to drive 10 mechanisms to construct a four-in-hand knot on a necktie that it wraps around its own neck. Grasping, pulling, aligning and winding the lengths of the tie, Mr. Knot can detect the occasional misstep or tear, untie the knot and get it right. Unlike Rube Goldberg’s whimsical contraptions, Mr. Goldstein’s is no mere cartoon. It works, if only for Mr. Knot. He cannot tie your tie.

Mr. Goldstein might be exceptional for the range of his skills, but he is characteristic of a sizable — and with the first of the baby boomers retiring now — expanding cohort of pensioners. Smart, agile and creative, they catch a liberating wind upon leaving the bosses, bureaucracies, commutes and time clocks of their workaday careers to tackle something consuming and new, whether for material reward or none at all.

Free of the constraints of the workplace, these retirees are the beneficiaries of life-stretching health care and a plunge in the poverty rate of elderly Americans (it’s 10 percent now, down from nearly 30 percent 50 years ago.) “The idea of children at play occurs to me,” says William A. Winn 3d, a psychologist in Boston who works for New Directions, a firm that helps guide retiring professionals and executives to new ventures.

“Retirement gives them the opportunity to flex their experience,” Dr. Winn says. Such experts speak of a postchildhood, postfamily-rearing, “third age” of “productive aging” and “positive aging.”

Nancy K. Schlossberg, 85, a retiree counselor and former University of Maryland psychologist, calls men and women who exploit the skills of their old jobs “continuers.” She calls those who take up something new “adventurers.” Continuers and adventurers make up the vigorous end of Dr. Schlossberg’s retirement spectrum, opposite those she calls “retreaters” who disengage from life and “spectators” who just watch.

More than half of all adults 55 and older spend at least half of their leisure time watching television, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports. Mr. Goldstein and Ms. Stone, 63, a retired technology analyst for the World Bank and Congress and a third-ager herself as a playwright, watch only four or five hours a week of television — all Great Courses like one on cosmology that they subscribed to this winter. They don’t watch from rocking chairs, or own one.

Mr. Goldstein grew up in New Rochelle, a Westchester County suburb. When he was 5, he said his father, an accountant, explained how locks guided a barge through a canal.

“I was intrigued,” he said. “He probably said, ‘Engineers make this kind of thing.’ ” When he was 7, his father took him on a tour of a Hershey chocolate factory. “I remember the machines wrapping up the candy bars and putting them into boxes,” he said.

And when he was 8, he and his parents drove through Cambridge, Mass. They passed a large campus. “My mom said, ‘That’s M.I.T.,’ ” Mr. Goldstein said. “’That’s the best engineering school in the country.’ I said, ’I want to go there.’ ”

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Mr. Goldstein with “Ro-Bow,” a device that can play a real violin.CreditMatt Roth for The New York Times

After New Rochelle High School he spent eight years at M.I.T. After six years in private industry, he went to the National Institutes of Health and found his niche in biomedical engineering. Sometimes though, his objectives in devising biomedical instruments clashed with those of N.I.H. managers and physicians. His catheter for treating brain tumors was dropped. “They lost interest,” he said. A doctor, “the main guy who wanted it, died.”

Out on his own, he needed a project. Ms. Stone, herself an engineer with three M.I.T. degrees in civil engineering, suggested a machine to tie a necktie, and the name — “Why Knot?” That led to an exhibition at the Franklin Institute, a science museum in Philadelphia. Next Mr. Goldstein turned to “Cram Guy,” a robot on loan to the American Visionary Arts Museum in Baltimore.

Propelled by seven motors, “Cram Guy,” in a red plaid flannel shirt, pulls an all-nighter preparing for an exam after a semester of undone homework. Frantically devouring a CliffsNotes study guide, his transparent nuts-and-bolts brain pulsates red, his legs pump, his right hand beats the desk. Whistles blow and cymbals gong. Something pours him a cup of espresso.

Assembling this robot, Mr. Goldstein asked himself, “What else can we add to this thing to make it more amusing?” He bolted a backscratcher to the guy’s hip to simmer him down. But there are too many distractions. A pinup of a blonde in torn denim shorts poses just off his right eye. Behind her a black cat grabs at a (computer) mouse dangling from a stick. In spite of it all, the fellow nods off, his head crashing to the desk. Then cymbals clash, and he’s at it again.

“Cram Guy” is pure Rube Goldbergian fantasy. By contrast, with compression of the machinery and fine-tuning, Mr. Goldstein might be onto something rational with “Ro-Bow,” a mechanism that can play any real violin with a real bow, and any tune that Mr. Goldberg can play on his electronic keyboard.

To translate his keyboard’s files for Ro-Bow to follow, he turned to Randall Pursley, a young software engineer who worked on biomedical instruments with Mr. Goldstein at N.I.H. Mr. Pursley writes the programs Ro-Bow plays. So far it plays an Irish jig, “Hello, Dolly,” “Amazing Grace” and Bach’s “Minuet in G Major.” But it can’t yet match a human violinist’s touch.

Maybe it will, and maybe it won’t. It’s the making alone that cranks up Mr. Goldstein. “You can look at him,” Ms. Stone says, “and say this is really weird. The way I spin it, he is really passionate. He has the courage and support to live his passion. It’s passion that carries him through a lifetime.”

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